Urban Confrontations, Made-up Languages and Performances in Mental Hospitals: French Lost Rock Uprising of 1968

The tremendous impact that the month of May 1968 had on the France's way of life was extensively chronicled. These youth demonstrations, which erupted at the Sorbonne before expanding across the nation, quickened the conclusion of the Gaullism government, politicised French philosophy, and spawned a wave of radical movies.

Much fewer recognized – beyond France, at bare minimum – about how the revolutionary ideas of 1968 manifested themselves musically in music. One Down Under artist and writer, for example, was aware of barely anything about France's alternative scene when he found a crate of vintage LPs, marked "French prog-rock" during a before Covid trip to the French capital. He felt impressed.

Underneath the underground … the musician of the band in 1968.

There was Magma, the expanded collective creating sound infused with a John Coltrane groove and the musical pathos of Carl "Carmina Burana" Orff, all while vocalizing in an created dialect known as the language. Additionally Gong, the electronic experimental band established by the musician of Soft Machine. Red Noise incorporated protest phrases within compositions, and yet another band produced poppy arrangements with outbreaks of instruments and drums and continuous improvisations. "I never experienced thrill similar after discovering German experimental music in late the eighties," states Thompson. "It represented a truly subterranean, rather than simply non-mainstream, culture."

This Australian-born artist, who experienced a degree of artistic achievement in the 1980s with indie band his previous band, completely fell in love with these bands, causing further travel, lengthy discussions and presently a publication.

Radical Roots

The revelation was that France's artistic transformation stemmed from a frustration with an previously globalised anglophone status quo: art of the fifties and 60s in European the continent typically appeared as uninspired carbon copies of Stateside or UK artists, including French singers or Les Variations, France's equivalents to Presley or the Rolling Stones. "The perception was they must sing in the language and appear comparable to the band to be capable to produce sound," the journalist states.

Other aspects influenced the intensity of the period. Before 1968, the Algerian war and the France's authorities' harsh suppression of dissent had radicalized a cohort. Fresh artists of French music performers were opposed to what they considered authoritarian control structure and the postwar government. They stood seeking fresh motivations, free of American mainstream material.

Jazz Influences

They found it in US music. The legendary trumpeter had been a frequent presence in Paris for a long time in the 1950s and sixties, and artists of the jazz group had sought refuge in France from discrimination and cultural restrictions in the United States. Other inspirations were Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry, as in addition to the experimental edges of rock, from Frank Zappa's his band, the group and King Crimson, to the experimental artist. The repetition-driven minimalism of La Monte Young and the musician (the latter a Parisian inhabitant in the 1960s) was another inspiration.

The musician at the Amougies gathering in 1969.

One band, one of the trailblazing psychedelic music ensembles of France's non-mainstream culture, was established by the siblings the Magal brothers, whose family took them to the renowned Blue Note venue on the street as youths. In the late 60s, during performing jazz in establishments including Le Chat Qui Pêche and journeying through the country, the musicians came across another artist and Christian Vander, who later create Magma. The movement started to take shape.

Musical Transformation

"Groups such as the group and the band had an immediate impact, motivating further artists to create their individual groups," says the writer. The musician's ensemble invented an complete genre: a fusion of jazz fusion, orchestral rock and contemporary classical art they named Zeuhl, a term meaning approximately "spiritual power" in their created tongue. Even today it unites groups from across the continent and, especially, Japan.

Following this the street confrontations, initiated after students at the university's Nanterre campus protested challenging a ban on mixed-gender student housing access. Virtually all group referenced in the volume took part in the demonstrations. Several musicians were fine arts learners at the institution on the area, where the Atelier Populaire produced the now-famous May 68 artworks, with slogans such as La beauté est dans la rue ("Beauty is on the public spaces").

Youth leader Daniel Cohn Bendit addresses the French capital crowd subsequent to the clearing of the Sorbonne in May 1968.